by Patrick Nunn
Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:
Sex on Earth by Jules Howard
p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong
Atoms Under the Floorboards by Chris Woodford
Spirals in Time by Helen Scales
Chilled by Tom Jackson
A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup
Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel
Suspicious Minds by Rob Brotherton
Herding Hemingway’s Cats by Kat Arney
Electronic Dreams by Tom Lean
Sorting the Beef from the Bull by Richard Evershed and Nicola Temple
Death on Earth by Jules Howard
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone
Soccermatics by David Sumpter
Big Data by Timandra Harkness
Goldilocks and the Water Bears by Louisa Preston
Science and the City by Laurie Winkless
Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher
Furry Logic by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher
Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett
My European Family by Karin Bojs
4th Rock from the Sun by Nicky Jenner
Patient H69 by Vanessa Potter
Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed
PIG/PORK by Pía Spry-Marqués
The Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker
Wonders Beyond Numbers by Johnny Ball
Immune by Catherine Carver
I, Mammal by Liam Drew
Reinventing the Wheel by Bronwen and Francis Percival
Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup
Best Before by Nicola Temple
Catching Stardust by Natalie Starkey
Seeds of Science by Mark Lynas
Outnumbered by David Sumpter
Eye of the Shoal by Helen Scales
Nodding Off by Alice Gregory
The Science of Sin by Jack Lewis
For HB and Mz
The author would like to acknowledge with respect and gratitude the originators and countless communicators of the remarkable stories covered in this book. He also thanks the traditional custodians of the land in the part of Australia where this book was written – the Gubbi Gubbi (Kabi Kabi) people – and their elders past and present whose spirits imbue the place with life and meaning.
Contents
Chapter 1 : Recalling the Past
Chapter 2 : Words that Matter in a Harsh Land
Chapter 3 : Australian Aboriginal Memories of Coastal Drowning
Chapter 4 : The Changing Ocean Surface
Chapter 5 : Other Oral Archives of Ancient Coastal Drowning
Chapter 6 : What Else Might We Not Realise We Remember?
Chapter 7 : Have We Underestimated Ourselves?
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
CHAPTER ONE
Recalling the Past
It was the year 1853, a balmy June afternoon in western Oregon, USA, and John W. Hillman, late of Albany, New York, was lost. Riding a mule, Hillman led his party of seven men up ‘a long, sloping mountain’ so they could try and figure out where they were. It was a good thing that the mule was not blind, Hillman reflected 50 years later, because otherwise he might have been the first New Yorker to drown in the lake that appeared unexpectedly almost 600m (1,968ft) below him when he reached the mountaintop.1 The lake was Crater Lake and the Hillman party is generally credited with providing the earliest written account of it. But they did not ‘discover’ it, for its existence was well known to the indigenous people of the district, principally the Klamath Indian tribes.
As gold seekers and settlers poured into this region over the next few decades, supported by government representatives, so the apparently strange attitude of the Klamath towards Crater Lake was increasingly remarked upon. For example, in 1886 a US Geological Survey reconnaissance group included two Klamath guides who were familiar with the entire area around the lake, ‘neither of whom had dared travel to Crater Lake before’.2 Around the same time, William Steel, intent on setting up a national park centred on Crater Lake, noted that the Klamath people he engaged refused to look at the lake at any time during his survey, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’.3 Enquiries revealed that to the Klamath, Crater Lake was a sacred place, one greatly respected and to be avoided by all except their shamans, who went there only when needing divine guidance.
What lies behind such behaviour and is it unique? In the case of the Klamath, the avoidance and respect behaviours are reportedly rooted in a memory of a time before Crater Lake existed, when the entire area was covered by a massive volcano, belatedly named Mt Mazama. One of some 18 active volcanic mountains forming the Cascade Range, from Lassen Peak in northern California to Silverthrone Caldera in western British Columbia, Crater Lake – and its long-dead ancestor Mt Mazama – formed along a line parallel to a giant ‘crack’ in the surface of the Earth’s crust off this part of North America. The crack marks the place where the crust underlying the vast Pacific Ocean is being thrust eastwards beneath the older continental crust of North America – reluctantly, it seems, for the movement of one piece of crust (or ‘plate’) under an adjoining piece progresses through stick-slip motion. Most of the time the two plates are stuck together, locked in place, but all the time they continue to be pushed more and more towards one another … until at last there is a slip, pressure is abruptly released (causing an earthquake) and the plates slip past one another.
This explains why this part of the western seaboard of North America is wracked by earthquakes compared to other parts of the continent. Sometimes the earthquakes occur on the ocean floor, abruptly displacing huge volumes of water and causing tsunamis. One of these occurred on 26 January 1700 off the central Washington coast,4 and sent a large wave across the North American shore – yet the only written records from this time come from Japan, which was also reached by this distantly generated tsunami.5
The slippage that causes earthquakes is only one aspect of the convergence of the crustal plates that occurs here. Another is the eruptions that have – over the past 40 million years – built the line of Cascadia volcanoes some 150–250km (93–155 miles) from the continent’s western edge. Actually more than 2,000 in number, these volcanoes trace the line deep below the ground surface where the downthrust Pacific Plate has become so hot that it melts, perhaps some 100km (62 miles) down where temperatures are more than 650°C (1,200°F). The melting produces liquid rock (or magma), which then – finding itself surrounded by cooler solid rocks – tries to force its way upwards through the overlying solid crust. Much of the time, probably even most of the time, it does not succeed in reaching the ground surface because most of the fissures it encounters do not extend far enough upwards, so the magma pools below the surface, where it gradually cools. But for the enterprising magma that does find a clear path to the ground surface, a more spectacular destiny is guaranteed.
Where magma rushing upwards from below through a constrained fissure finally comes out to the ground surface, the rapid cooling it experiences often results in explosive eruptions and – less spectacularly – the successive deposition of lavas that gradually build a volcano above the mouth of the subterranean fissure. As these volcanoes become larger, and perhaps as the supply of magma from beneath becomes progressively less, so it often becomes more difficult for eruptions to occur at the summit of the volcano. In such cases, flank (or parasitic) cones may develop at lower levels. Occasionally, the magma supply dries up altogether and a volcano is declared extinct, or at least dormant. Thereafter it is doomed to slowly degrade, often becoming worn down so as to appear almost indistinguishable f
rom the surrounding landscape. This certainly seems to be what is happening with the Canadian Cascade volcanoes. Silverthrone has not erupted for an estimated 100,000 years and is probably extinct. But then most volcanoes go through periods of dormancy, often lasting centuries, before springing back into activity. Mt St Helens is one of these volcanoes – its present period of activity, the centrepiece of which was the eruption on 18 May 1980, followed two periods of dormancy lasting more than a century. Enough to lull anyone into a false sense of security, you might suppose.
You see the fateful consequences of this mindset in many places, not just the north-west United States, of course. It occurs where new people arriving to live in a potentially hazardous area may be unaware of the danger, while longer-term residents are more wary. This contrast is amplified when the new arrivals are literate and the long-term occupants are non-literate, since literacy often confers arrogance and an uncritical faith in the superiority of the written over the spoken word. Around Crater Lake, settlers in the late nineteenth century were generally uninterested in the cautionary stories and behaviours of the Klamath, but more than that, Western science has been slow to consider the possibility that such folk memories may have been based on observations of a geological phenomenon – in this case a massive volcano-destroying eruption – empirical evidence of which has been pieced together only within the last few decades.
The Klamath story holds that within Mt Mazama resided a god – the Chief of the Below World – who desired to wed the beautiful Loha, a human living in a nearby village, but she resisted his blandishments.6 Enraged, the Below-World Chief began to rain red-hot rocks and burning ash down on Loha’s people, but they were saved through the intervention of the Above-World Chief, who eventually caused the mountain to collapse inwards on his underworld counterpart. The hollow that formed filled with water and thus Crater Lake came into being. In 1865, a Klamath elder explained how these events had shaped his people’s attitude towards the area:
Now you understand why my people never visit the lake. Down through the ages we have heard this story. From father to son has come the warning, ‘Look not upon the place. Look not upon the place, for it means death or everlasting sorrow.’ 7
The Klamath stories are interpreted as recalling a time before Crater Lake existed, when Mt Mazama towered over the landscape of this part of Oregon. They recall its explosive self-destruction, the ensuing collapse and the formation of the lake – a process well known to geologists studying the life cycles of such massive volcanoes. To understand what happens, consider that large volcanoes like Mt Mazama are often fed from a shallow underground chamber that periodically fills with magma. In this case, the voluminous eruption that saw this volcano blow itself to pieces was fed from a magma chamber about 5km (3 miles) deep. So much magma came out that the magma chamber was suddenly emptied – a massive void under the ground remained and, unable to support the weight of the overlying volcano, collapsed. Today, where Mt Mazama once stood, the eponymous crater lake occupies a landform called a caldera that formed above the collapsed magma chamber.
What is really interesting here is that the radiometric dating of rocks belonging to the former Mt Mazama show that its self-destruction occurred some 7,600 years ago.8 We are left to wonder how the story of the formation of Crater Lake could have endured so long among people whose only method of recalling their history, at least until about 150 years ago, was through word of mouth … parent to child, parent to child across almost countless generations. It was a story of history, of course, but also one with a warning: keep away from this place, it is dangerous; terrible things happened here, involving beings who are more powerful than us mortals, beings whom we suspect still dwell here.
It is likely that the memory of Mt Mazama was kept alive for such an extraordinarily long time precisely because it was considered to contain such practical advice relating to the survival of the Klamath people. But the astonishing thing about the story is its longevity. How could an eyewitness account of events 7,600 years ago filter down to us today, almost entirely through intergenerational oral transmission? And what does this mean for our understanding of humankind? Somewhat against the grain of the last 100 years or so of scientific inference, this book argues that stories of this kind do exist in many of the world’s cultures, but that their apparent longevity has led to their dismissal by generations of scientific commentators who have been unable to overcome their knee-jerk scepticism about the implied time depth of oral tradition. Perhaps it is time to look less circumspectly, with a more open mind, at traditions of possible great longevity elsewhere.
History celebrates memorable events and shuns the mundane. It is in our nature to do this – to wish to have our minds stimulated and our imaginations unleashed – rather than to be compelled to focus on predictable everyday happenings. In each decade of adulthood we are prone to look back at our lives, illuminating and calibrating our personal histories with light-bulb pops of uncommon events. Now imagine the personal stretched to the communal, the journey through time of a particular people living in a particular place and trying to make sense of their history without the aid of literacy.
A fine example comes from the islands of Pukapuka in the Cook Islands group of the South Pacific. A jewel in a turquoise sea, inhabited for a millennium or more by a resilient people following a way of life optimally adapted to a comparatively low, remote and resource-constrained tropical location. Of course, we can paint lives in contrasting ways, and probably most modern Pukapukans would consider themselves blessed, fortunate to be living in a bountiful environment immune from the pressures that many urban dwellers routinely experience. But it has not always been so on Pukapuka, the traditional (largely oral) history of which is in two parts, separated by what the islanders recall as te mate wolo – the great death. As near as we can tell, it happened at night sometime in the early decades of the seventeenth century, when a giant wave – almost certainly a tsunami generated by an ocean-floor earthquake off the western margin of the Americas, perhaps Chile – smashed into the island. The oral histories remember that the ‘waters raged on the reefs, the sea was constantly rising, the tree tops were bending low’.9 Everything was destroyed; no houses and no food gardens remained in the aftermath. The traditions state that just two women and 17 men ‘with remnants of their families’ survived to re-establish human society on Pukapuka.
Another example comes from Sirente in central Italy, during the late Roman period around 1,650 years ago. This marked a time when Christianity was slowly gaining a foothold in the region, displacing supposedly pagan cults like that which embraced the Dionysian ritual practices of ecstatic dancing and licentious behaviour following the annual grape harvest. The story from Sirente, dating from about the year ad 412, describes the start of a ritual in a mountainside temple around sunset:
Dances and songs were practised, along with clever and ribald witticisms. Dishevelled Bacchanalians languished under the effect of wine. Hairy satyrs, human at the top except for their goat’s ears and legs, danced with snow-white nymphs and the corpulent and sunburnt Silèni. The nymph Sìcina was by far the most beautiful, shameless and bold. Around her, the orgy would become intense, almost violent. 10
But then an ‘uproar hit the mountain’, trees were split apart and a ‘sudden and intense heat overwhelmed the people’:
All of a sudden … a new star, never seen before, bigger than all the other ones, came nearer and nearer, appeared and [then] disappeared behind the top of the eastern mountains. People’s eyes looked at the strange light growing bigger and bigger … an irresistible, dazzling light pervaded the sky.
The ‘star’ was a meteorite, glowing as it passed over the Dionysians to crash to Earth in the neighbouring valley with a massive thump that shook the mountains. While the force of the explosion caused the meteorite to vaporise, the crater its impact made remains clearly visible, and samples from the compacted ground surface have allowed the time of the collision to be estimated. There was no sci
ence available at the time to allow the revellers to make sense of what had happened, so they interpreted it as a sign to embrace Christianity, something they did with immediate, uncompromising and enduring fervour.11
For most of the time since the fall of this meteorite, the story of its impact on local beliefs was passed on orally from one generation to the next, and it was not written down until the 1890s. It is easy to believe that to discourage recidivism the people of the Sirente wished to keep alive the lesson their ancestors had been given, but what is more remarkable is the inescapable fact that the story was passed down by word of mouth across so many generations, perhaps 60–70, without its essence being lost.
This is remarkable by modern standards, of course, for most of us could readily name instances of imperfect recollection in our daily lives. But then most of us have grown up reading, dependent on the written word – and its visual extensions – for knowledge of just about everything we know at the flick of a page or the press of a button. We have become dependent on writing and reading, and in the process have invariably convinced ourselves that the written word is superior – must be superior – to the spoken word. But it was not always so.
Think about why we communicate, why we speak, why we write. In today’s modern, globalised world, the reasons are many – to inform, to counsel, to negotiate, to express our feelings. In the past, when human survival required generally less information and involved fewer choices, the same four reasons would also have applied, but would have been far more constrained. Take food choices as an example. In the course of a single day, many of today’s urban dwellers routinely have to make food choices – in stores, markets and restaurants – that their ancestors 1,000 years earlier could not have imagined. Food in such times was a mere part of life, inadequate for many, and rarely a subject involving choice. Today in many richer countries, food is not just a matter of choice but is often emblematic, its methods of preparation and serving having almost countless permutations – all of which, of course, need words to explain, words that might be difficult for each of us to remember accurately were it not for writing.
